“There is no such thing as a worthless conversation, provided you know what to listen for. And questions are the breath of life for a conversation.”
James Nathan Miller
excellent words from my friend bruce morley in the fall of 2006..
Over a lifetime I’ve played hundreds of different musics, much of it for
money as a professional. It’s been my experience that any music that
abrogates to itself a claim to purity, incorruptibility or metaphysical
significance etc eventually runs headlong into the secular,
hypocrisy-inducing fact that the methods of propagation, distribution, and
attempts to gain widespread acceptance or recognition of said music/s can
differ but little from any employed by “lesser” musics. This has been the
bete noir of the blues, earnest folk music, and new age music, to name but
three. (After several million $, a few Cadillacs, and a few publicity
stunts, can BB King still sing the blues? Nobody seems prepared to admit he
hasn’t made a decent significant album in decades.) In this respect, pop
music is more honest – it simply gets on with a job which is determinedly
ephemeral, where lasting significance is almost accidental, and where
money-grubbing success is regarded as a very worthwhile aim indeed. Can
millions of consumers of this be wrong or deluded ? Actually, in my book,
they can, but that doesn’t alter the hard fact that success on the same
scale for more esoteric musics will require a dance with the Devil, and you
can’t have it both ways. Like religion, the charge of hypocrisy awaits any
music that claims sainthood.
Left Then, What For You?
Only that you are the heart of my heart and the breath of my gasping, the wound of my flesh, the light bouncing off my iris. This one breath, song and dance for you still what does it mean… nothing…
For you would miss it all, eyes cast off in another pallid and dull direction..
Life then, found in these limbs, in this embrace
Truth in these words, my songs alive for your sake
Your strength long sought found in my willingness to lay in your arms
that is strength and truth, that you are strong enough for me..